schroeringa_songs with Ciba edits

In 2012, the Dutch collective Wunderbaum brought their “theatreconcert,”—“Songs at the End of the World”—to the Fusebox Festival in Austin, Texas. U.S. Customs and Border Control wouldn’t let them bring their giant Antarctica backdrop into the country, but they got to keep their enormous red overcoats. These overcoats are so bulky that they completely obscure the human figures of the performers as they shuffle onstage at the top of the show. Set off against the stark white cyclorama, facing the audience, unmoving in a straight, silent line upstage, it is hard to look at these creatures without asking, what are they, really? Which is another way of asking, what is “the human”? It is a question that has only gained in urgency in the intervening years, as our species’ destructive impact on the planet becomes continually more pronounced, and the polar caps (where this performance is set) continues to melt at a quickening pace. Captured on video for Sound Off!’s online archive, the performance retains the cadence and rhythms of the rough liveness integral to the ethos of the piece and welcomes the asynchronous viewer into the community of spectators, whose audible responses are captured on tape.

What unfolds over the 90 recorded minutes is a series of monologues, short scenes, and indie-rock musical performances that another reviewer has described as akin to (appropriately enough) the Arctic Monkeys. With only the sparse design accoutrements of their musical instruments, rolling carts that look like they belong backstage, and a couple of transparent umbrellas that serve as both ice mounds and—in one memorable scene—floating jellyfish, the collective carries us through the childhoods and early adulthoods of several seemingly unrelated characters. The performers shed their anonymous overcoats to reveal all-too-human characters, including a young boy in a speedo who learns to swim away from his hometown, a man with a sun allergy who feels at home among the penguins, a young woman who wants to fly, and a teenager reciting a poem about becoming a blue creature in a wincingly earnest audition for her performing arts high school. Throughout each vignette, the characters seek out ways to adapt to, escape from, or modify habitats that don’t quite fit.

The entire performance has the feel of theater newly-discovered and explored, as in a performing arts high school. The ensemble is alternately tongue-in-cheek about their lo-tech play (they ride across the stage on a rolling sound cart dressed in spandex to represent figure skating) and almost uncomfortably earnest (as in the rock-ballad “Silent John” that repeats the lyrics silent John, where have you gone? scores of times. In answer to the question, “what is the human?” Wunderbaum seems to suggest that we are a species striving to be something and somewhere else, and to share that journey with others. A powerful celebration of and argument for the necessity of live performance and play.